Saturday, May 19, 2007

I doubt there's anyone who'd seriously question Pat's Conservative credentials. Indeed, he's a proud paleoconservative - and he's pointing out that he's right more often than neocons based on his version of "Right."

But what's interesting is that fox vewiers got there first, giving Sen. Ron Paul (Libertarian-republican and anti-war from the beginning) a clear win. Granted, this was probably not Fox's usual demographic, but still...

Does the man not have a point? The United States is now tied down in a bloody guerrilla war in the Middle East and increasingly hated in Arab and Islamic countries where we were once hugely admired as the first and greatest of the anti-colonial nations. Does anyone think that Osama is unhappy with what is happening to us in Iraq?

Of the 10 candidates on stage in South Carolina, Dr. Paul alone opposed the war. He alone voted against the war. Have not the last five years vindicated him, when two-thirds of the nation now agrees with him that the war was a mistake, and journalists and politicians left and right are babbling in confession, “If I had only known then what I know now …”

Rudy implied that Ron Paul was unpatriotic to suggest the violence against us out of the Middle East may be in reaction to U.S. policy in the Middle East. Was President Hoover unpatriotic when, the day after Pearl Harbor, he wrote to friends, “You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bitten.”

Pearl Harbor came out of the blue, but it also came out of the troubled history of U.S.-Japanese relations going back 40 years. Hitler’s attack on Poland was naked aggression. But to understand it, we must understand what was done at Versailles – after the Germans laid down their arms based on Wilson’s 14 Points. We do not excuse – but we must understand."

I don't have a great deal in common with Ron Paul OR Pat Buchanan, other than this - the common-sense observation that foreign policy is no different than any other sort of human interaction; if it is inequitable, if bad faith is involved, you create legitimate enemies, and if that sort of behavior is a consistent part of your foreign policy, sooner or later you will have to pay the piper.

This is about ethics, in other words. They apply just as strongly to our government's behavior toward "ferreners" as they do to it's behavior toward us - and my observation is that people and governments are just as willing to play fast and loose with people they know as those they don't - though the chances of being made to pay personally for their errors tends to keep them under control.

Almost by definition, wars occur because of some injustice or blunder, real, perceived or more usually, some mixture of the two. So the first step in ending such wars and foreign adventures is to admit that we are neither smart enough, wise enough or well-informed enough to impose solutions on other people - especially when those other people have every reason to question the purity of our motives.